Consisting of 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with I remember, and all limited to pieces of public knowledge brand names and folk wisdom, actors and illnesses, places and things ( I remember: When parents drink, children tipple ; I remember Hermès handbags, with their tiny padlocks ; I remember myxomatosis ) the book represents a secret key to the world of Perec s fiction.
As critic, translator, and Perec biographer David Bellos notes in his introduction to this edition, since its original publication, It s hardly possible to utter the words je me souviens in French these days without committing a literary allusion. As playful and puzzling as the best of Perec s novels, I Remember began as a simple writing exercise, and grew into an expansive, exhilarating work of art: the image of one unmistakable and irreplaceable life, shaped from the material of our collective past. For this edition, Perec s 480 memories, sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure, have been elucidated and explained by David Bellos.
This book is manifestly autobiographical and also obeys a rigid (but not difficult) formal constraint. It is also one of the oddest works of literature ever written. Published in 1978 shortly after Perec's masterpiece, Life A User's Manual, won the Médicis Prize, I Remember is not a play, a poem, or a novel, and it's not a memoir in the ordinary sense either.
